Kid Lego Inventor

Here's your nightly math! Just 5 quick minutes of number fun for kids and parents at home. Read a cool fun fact, followed by math riddles at different levels so everyone can jump in. Your kids will love you for it.

Kid Lego Inventor

It’s exciting when people invent a cool new tool. But it’s even more exciting when a kid invents the first one using Lego. A California mom got tired of the clutter in her bathroom — hair dryers, curling irons, electrical cords. So she jokingly asked her son Jack to build a cabinet out of Lego that would hold all these weird shapes. Jack built a pretty great one, so the mom made a new one out of regular plastic, and entered a TV contest called Homemade Millionaire. Their invention won the contest! Now you can buy the “Style ‘n Go” in real stores. So what will Jack build next?

Wee ones: How many pink things can you count in the n Style ‘n Go picture?

Little kids: What shape are the Lego bricks in the top photo? Bonus: If his Lego invention used 100 pieces of red Lego, 100 blue, 100 green and 100 yellow, how many pieces did it use? Count up by 100s!

Big kids: If Jack had 20 long Lego pieces, and wanted the same number of pieces in each shelf, how many different size shelves could he build? Bonus: If Mrs. McKenna makes $100 on each Style ‘n Go she sells, how many does she need to sell to make $1,000,000 (1 million dollars)?

About the Author

Laura Bilodeau Overdeck is founder and president of Bedtime Math Foundation. Her goal is to make math as playful for kids as it was for her when she was a child. Her mom had Laura baking while still in diapers, and her dad had her using power tools at a very unsafe age, measuring lengths, widths and angles in the process. Armed with this early love of numbers, Laura went on to get a BA in astrophysics from Princeton University, and an MBA from the Wharton School of Business; she continues to star-gaze today. Laura’s other interests include her three lively children, chocolate, extreme vehicles, and Lego Mindstorms.